So today I had to go into town and have a meeting about my career options for the future.
Surprisingly enough having set my heart on becoming a ninja, there seems to be a distinct lack of training available in Ireland for budding Ninjas which was quite a disappointment.

Personally I thought there would have been a market for Irish ninjas, I had even considered a green ninja outfit. I know the traditional ninja outfit is black so as to be undetectable at night, but the green outfit could be used for more agricultural/horticultural based assassinations where the green would blend in perfectly with fields/hedges/trees etc…..

So there’s ninjaing ruled out as a career, looks like it’ll have to be back to IT then 😦

For those of you with some kind of Teresa Lowe fixation, you can stop reading now as it’s not about her or her marvellous 80’s TV show!

The thought struck me today that maybe at the ripe old age of 33 I should move to distant foreign lands !
This decision has been reached after leaving the employment of my most recent employer on less than friendly terms last week. Mind you it was only my 2nd employer in 10 years (with only about 6 months of sweet unemployment in those 10 years) but none the less the shock to the system of not having to get up early each morning (or work late each evening) has made me arrive at the decision that Ireland is no longer the wonderful place that I always liked to think it could have been…..and that there are better places in the world to wake up in.

Having given the employers and females of Ireland their fair chance, I feel the time is right to move on and offer the wonderful oppurtunity that is me to another country (and single female section of it’s population).

The choices are this at the moment :
USA
Canada
New Zealand
Scandinavia
Dubai

The USA & Canada both secured their place in the final 5 because each of them has a Gavin living there with whom I am very good friends.

USA has Gavin Mc who is married has a kid and lives in upstate new york. I have spent some of the finest nights (and days) of inebriation of my adult life in the company of this man, and judging by the way he continues to ring me drunk at 7am irish time to tell me he had a great night, I’m assuming american beer isn’t so bad !
Employment prospects in the US for my line of work are apparently quite good at the moment and I have several contacts in NY from my old job so I may be able to line up a job, but the whole moving to America thing just seems to have been done to death !

Canada has Gavin B who can be found regularly over on the irish groups of myspace berating “oirish” americans for their idyllic notions of the IRA and Ireland while pretending to write his next novel.

This man has a lot of pent up anger, but then so would you if your parents forcibly moved you from Dublin to wicklow in the midst of your early teen angst !
He assures me that Canada has more strip clubs than churches so that’s a plus in the column for Canada !

New Zealand is bereft of Gavin’s, or at least ones that I know personally anyway !
It’s main drawing point would be it’s location (opposite side of the world) and it’s love of rugby and beer. I like to think that if I was a country I would be New Zealand (except I’m not a sore loser).
It also has beautiful landscapes and apparently a significant shortage of single men in their 20-30’s so that’s a major plus in my book. Added to this the fact that the single biggest customer of my former employers software is based there and that makes my chances of employment fairly good!

Scandinavia….Again bereft of any Gavins that I know, I won’t deny that it attained it’s place in the final 5 purely for thanks to the calibre of the women it produces. Firstly it’s 4 seperate countries, although Finland would have to be ruled out straight away as I’ve met Finnish people and they are some of the mosts unfunny and unhappy individuals I have ever met, so that leaves us with Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Denmark is a bit too mainland europe for me and Norway & Sweden spend the large majority of their year being very cold indeed so I would have to say Scandinavia has very little chance of making it to the final 2!

And Lastly Dubai. This unexpected entrant made it into the top on the basis of having a Greg rather than a Gavin. It’s also a very warm country and would pay ridiciously well for my talents as Greg is always telling me. However it’s drawbacks are it’s lack of alcohol and a single female population. The lack of alcohol can be circumvented as they mainly turn a blind eye to westerners bringing in alcohol as duty free and you can buy alcohol in many of the tourist orientated hotels, but on the single female population subject there appears to be no room for discussion. It would seem the Sicilian rule of “you touch it, you buy it” applies in Dubai and 99% of buying (marrying) takes place before any touching has occured. That coupled with the fact that due to the masses of oil money among the local population, inter-marrying among local families is widespead to protect the wealth…so it’s very much a closed market !
Despite this it may yet make it to the final 2 on the basis of it’s “move here for 5 years and make a ridiculous amount of money TAX FREE” charm !!!!

Obviously the top 5 were whittled down by me from over 14 potential countries (I was very disappointed to find that while Greece does in fact have an island called lesbos, it already has many single male inhabitants), and there were some very tough decisions in reaching this final 5.

The Czech Republic and Poland both very nearly made it into the final 5 on the Scandinavian tactic of having an extremely attractive female population, but the fact that they’re all moving to Ireland means that these countries can’t be such great places to live really.

No offence to either of these great nations, but I feel deciding to move there would be like meeting someone in a nightclub and bringing them home…it seems like a great idea at the time but the following morning you wish you hadn’t done it!

Fiji also very nearly made it to the top 5 based on a fascinating article in a National Geographic I read at the dentists this morning about it’s reefs.
However on further contemplation after leaving the dentist I have reached the decision that they probably don’t want IT people messing with their reefs and expect you to have a degree in marine biology or some such subject, so I left it at that and didn’t even look into the whole single female population issue.

So there you have it, I have to decide on my future so feel free to suggest your choice of where I should move to (although I am free to ignore any suggestions and make my own decision)